What is love, what words can express the feeling?
Exciting, invigorating, painful, transcending…there are lots of ways to express how love is. At least for me.
The worst is unrequited love…that feels like a knife in your gut that keeps twisting harder and harder…
To like something is to value it for its effects or ultility.
To love something is to value it for its intrinsic properties.
For instance you could love a flower for its arangement of petals, and then like bees for pollenateing flowers.
Or
You could love bees for their complexity of behavoir and like flowers for feeding the bees.
So the test to see if you love something is weather or not you’d value it to exist even if it could not effect anything you or anything you loved.
So for example, I like chocolate. I like it because it makes me happy, and more because it makes certian people I love happy. If chocolate did not effect anyone I cared about or even hypthotecialy could care about if I knew them (which may well be a large proportion of the Earth’s population,) I would cease to value chocholate.
However, I love my downstairs neighbor. If she were to fly to another planet where she could effect nothing else I valued, I still would value her.
Probably the best way to express this is not in words, but in always being willing to help someone, even if they are not doing anything for you- and perhapse will not do anything for you at any point in the future.
I got out of the bath today and there were two towels… one a bit damp and old, the other a brand new clean soft big one! I so much wanted to wrap myself up in the big one, but chose the small damp one. Why? Because my 3 year old daughter went in the bath after me and I … love her.
“Love with conditions is not love.”
DALE
I’m not being flippid here, but I don’t think love really exists. I thought I was in love once, but it wound up just being an anxiety attack over the fact I kept getting an erection whenver I looked at a particular girl.
I don’t get those (the anxiety attacks over erections), so I haven’t had the feeling of love again.
I think love is just being lost in comfort. As some can probably tell, I don’t seek others for my comfort. I look only to myself.
Either love doesn’t exist or I’m not equipped to love.
Both ways, I’m skeptical of the whole concept in its entirety.
Of course, there’s only like, what, 10000000 posts on this exact same subject in this exact same forum. Perhaps you should go through the stuff from about two weeks, three weeks, 4 weeks, 2 months…4 months (and so on) ago.
Love is when the beholder is privileged to behold the beauty in another … and all are beautiful, it is only marred, obscured or not seen …
Well Rafajafar, its an interesting question.
We have a term, love. This term, like all terms, should have some definitoin that serves as a funtion to determine if anything is an example of love.
For there to be no such thing as love would mean one of two things:
- Nothing actually fuffils the defintion.
or - The definition is self-contradictiory, and therefore cannot be filled.
So whcih do you think it is? And what defintion do you use of love?
Finnially, do you find a problem with the definition I presented. Does it fail to meet a criterion that you think love should have?
this is nice, I agree with it to a certain point. you can love platonically like this, for example, an unrequited love in terms of the boy-girl relationship. but does platonic love exist forever. say no. sooner or later, we stop to love someone who cannot pay us back our love.
you may contradict that to love somebody is to value the subject for its intrinsic qualities, and that there are more types of love than just male-female. but are we sure that love is not utilitarian? isn’t it like that that you have a feeling you love somebody but in fact you are just supporting your ego or find satisfaction of your psyche for behaving empathically, isn;t it a self-satisfaction, and thus utilitarian? of course, me personally, I do love, and I would die without love, but isn’t every interractive relationship utilitarian in a way? we perform acts of love in order to become satisfied with ourselves. Still, I can;t say it about motherly love for excample, this one is TRUE.
To a large degree what I have presented is a metaphysical construction without much support exept an appeal to common intuitions. So no I’m not sure, not sure at all.
But I do want to be understood, so I know if we are actually disagreeing- I have a feeling we aren’t.
So lets do a hypothetical! 
Lets imagine a girl Anne. She has two suitors Brian and Clint. Both Brian and Clint are very falltering and chivilrous to Anne, and both make her feel like a princess not to mention the great sex. Anne begins to care for them both and make them her famous cucumber sandwhichs. By spending time with them, she begins to learn more about them. She learns that Brian is overall a worthless human being. She learns on the other hand that Clint has various forms of beauty that make him intrisically valueable.
Who does she love?
Now, however I do think, that unrequited love does indeed last forever. In middleschool I though some girl was the shizzle, and despite the fact that I have almost completely forgotten her, if someone reminded me of her various properties- I would probably still love her (or value her intrisically.)
Now if its just to strange to say I love someone I’ve forgotten, then maybe that counts as a second condition. So love would be:
- Something one values for its intrinsic properties.
- Something one remembers.
I’m not sure I like this definition much, because if we assume dead people lose there memories, we would be forced to say: “No suzy, Grandma doesn’t love you anymore, because she is dead.”
Let us march towards the truth together? 
Love is chemicals created by the evolutionary adaptation to enforce pack survival and procreation.
feel the post-modern cynisism seeth…
Love is but a state in a quiet mind. When all else ceases to be, that is where love will be.
Hello all… Im new to ILP
Love is a like a sense of deja vu or rather reverie which hits one due to a thought, sensation or when in the company of someone or in the vicinity of something. Love is when one is influenced by a sunset not because he/she has seen the sunset before and feels comfortable with it, but because that person is intuitively involved in a kind of game - a game in which he/she sees the need to unravel their creativity to what they feel is a worthwhile stimulus.
Often legacies of such things cause people who are aware of their delusions to feel this way, so love is not only a unique feeling, it is a powerful feeling.
Another thing which is perhaps true of people in love is that they are in harmony when confronted with these stimuli and whatever they are seeking all the rest of the time is left behind in the pursuit of indulgence.
Having said all the above, I have to say here that love or affection or any of the irrational motivational thoughts which arise in our minds havent been understood objectively, since the human brain is a very complex machine and though we know all the parts we do not know how its all put together…and it hasnt been understood convincingly even in terms of response and stimuli, leave alone how it works. So all these discussions are at best irrational expressions of other irrational thoughts and positions and situations.
Love is the description of the existence of compliments. Compliments are the connection between one. It is not that the connection itself is one but rather that the two compliments are one.
Red and green are compliments only when they are viewed in light. In darkness, they are one-a dark color. It is in this darkness that love exists. But the light allows the compliments to exist and the compliments need to exist in order for their to be love. It is truly a game-a game that cannot be acknowledged-yet is in the darkness. It continues, neither compliment knowing when to quit or when to admit that the game is being played!
Love is the joining of the compliments of the universe!
Love - an addiction of chemicals in the brain.
Something distuirbs me about this question.
The last couple post definiately talk about things that exist, but are they love? Is what I talked about love or something else? Is love a term that we use and yet have no commonality when speaking about it? Perhapse its a case of family resembalance terms gone wild. It seems were at a point were I to have a conversation with someone asking “Are you in love?” would be worthless, because I would have no idea weather they veiwed love as a chemical slurry, the Dao, or any of a hundered other things.
This is horrible. When my baby says “I love you” I want it to mean something and communicate something to me, but we seem to have let our language degenerate to the point where I would have no clue what to think. The only thing I can find consistent in all accounts of love in this thread (other than simply dening it) is it involves two things and their relationship.
I protest!!!
As well you should. I forgot the language (I think it was Greek) but they had four different words for love. I don’t know what they are but they were used to describe love at different kinds of levels. Now we only have one love so it makes it seem like out love for a candy bar is equivalent to the love we have for someone. Maybe when we sumed it all up into one word we distoryed love?
You’re wrong! When you gave that nicer towel to your daughter, did it not make you profoundly happy? Then how can you call that unconditional love? On the other hand, if you hadn’t done so, then it would have made you feel perhaps guilty or miserable. So you see, we do things only to please ourselves, even when we do things to please others. And for the same reason, there is no such thing as unconditional love. Even a mother’s love for her child can start to weaken if not returned. We are all human. Love is only a give and take, if it’s not reciprocated, it will disappear in time. 
beenaJain, i agree with you in all, but why do you think mother’s love for her child can stop when it isn;t returned? I’m not a mother but if I were, and I had a child. bedridden, seriously physically or mentally ill for example, I wouldn;t stop or weaken my love for him/her because it isn;t reciprocal. even if my child hated me I think I would love him the same.
in fact unconditional love in this case is what motherhood is defined by. but I don;t want to make ultimate statements about it, I just feel it should be somewhere around there.
BeenaJain
That old an busted argument for psychological egoism won’t phase me.
The fact that doing X makes A happy.
Does NOT imply
That A did X to be happy.
Futuremore,
The fact that doing X makes A happy.
Is what a generous urge is! 
However, there does seem to be someting wrong with a completely unconditional love. If the object of my love somehow changes all the properties I love it for- then I will no longer love it.
I’d also want to say, despite the fact it could earn me crucifiction. That something being your spawn, is no good basis for love. While it is possibly to love your spawn, most people are blinded by there extreem like due to the fact that the creature is doing the service of carrying your genes and often your ideals. You have to wait until its a teenager, refuses to breed, and throws all your ideals in your face, then you can know if you love your kids.
lenore,
It’s true that a mother will always want to look after after her bed-ridden child or one mentally ill. And there will be enormous love from the mother’s side but in time if for some reason this love is not felt, returned visibly or in some obvious way, it will change more to responsibility or kindness. So, yes, no doubt lenore if you were a mother, you would look after your young no matter how handicapped they were, but it would not be because of unconditional love, just love, which will change to responsibility and kindness if not reciprocated in time. And, motherhood is defined by unconditional love because practically everyone agrees with that, but I don’t have to, and I don’t. If I agreed with that then I would also have to agree that no mother ever gave her kid up for adoption or to an institution, never killed her own, etcetera, but I can’t because it is not true. So, you see motherhood can be defined by love but not unconditional love. There is no such thing as unconditional love, only a give and take and that is alright, that is how it should be.